Videos show Vegas police helping people escape gunfire
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Some of the first Las Vegas police officers to respond to the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history huddled with people taking cover, organized escape routes, carried wounded victims to safety and ducked behind barriers as bullets rained around them, according to video released on Wednesday.
“It’s coming from the Mandalay Bay!” an officer is heard saying on one video.
“Stay down!” he tells unseen people during bursts of rapid gunfire, while a dispatcher on his police radio says multiple people have gunshot wounds. “Over here! Get behind the police car!”
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department released 28 clips of police body-camera video ranging from a few seconds to more than two hours, totaling about 10 hours of footage. It was the sixth batch of information released under court order in a public records lawsuit from media organizations, including The Associated Press.
Names of the officers were not provided. Police and the FBI have declined to comment on any of the material released months after the Oct. 1 shooting, which killed 58 people and injured hundreds of others attending an outdoor concert.
Video, audio and documents have not shed light on a motive for the massacre. Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, the elected head of the Police Department, has said the investigation has not identified one.
One 28-minute clip shows an officer helping terrified concertgoers duck beneath the stage of the country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip to escape helicopter-sounding gunfire. He carried a wounded woman to a makeshift triage center in a parking lot, banding her bleeding leg with a tourniquet and driving her to a hospital.
“You gotta go! We’re in the firing zone! He can see us from here!” the unidentified officer tells people near the stage after the concert turned to chaos.
Another clip has a radio dispatcher reporting “multiple casualties” before an officer parks and jumps from his patrol vehicle. He and other officers use it as a shield from the gunfire.
More shots are fired, and someone among the officers says, “I’m down, I got shot!”
Another video, lasting about 30 minutes and not identified with a time stamp, shows officers in a hallway outside the Mandalay Bay hotel suite where authorities say gunman Stephen Paddock killed himself before police reached him. The back of an officer’s hand was sweating as he uncaps a bottle of water.